I understand what Glass is saying, but I can't understand why you would call a marriage in which a partner had weak boundaries a "good" marriage. That's my fundamental disagreement with that concept. BTW, Glass's assertion is an "opinion", not a "fact".

I do agree with the MLC observation. In my case, I begged and pleaded for wife to engage with me during the MLC. I reached out to her because I was scared...she rejected me for the same reason. The biggest mistake the spouse of someone in MLC can make is to discount the reality of the MLC for their spouse. Saying "It's just a phase, you'll get over it" is disasterous. This rejection allowed me to emotionally disengage from my wife...I believed she didn't care about what I was going through...she didn't care about me.

If you have spouse in MLC, you can be assured they will come out of it different than they were before. You have to decide if you want to continue to be married to this different person.

LO,


I think what she is describing here is a marriage devoid of any obvious signs of strife or incompatibility, where each spouse would be willing to describe their marriage as a good one. But when circumstances evolve into a situation where one spouse is tempted into having an affair, that spouse may "adjust" their boundaries to pursue it.

hiker...i so appreciate all of the information that you are sharing....especailly from Pittman as that is one book i don't have

And here's where it fails the test...my wife and I BOTH would have agreed that the marriage was GOOD - WHILE I WAS HAVING THE AFFAIR!

But was it really? You tell me.

I guess Glass would say that if you were both satisfied that the marriage was good, then who is to say it wasn't? Pittman would call that kind of affair a marital arrangement, and there are people who live like that and are apparently satisfied with whatever mutually agreed conditions exist.

But my understanding from what you wrote before was that you were in a kind of emotional turmoil with your wife refusing to accept certain issues you had. So I am not sure why you would call your marriage "good" as in free of strife, etc.

eav,

Thanks. Here is another dose of Pittman for you:


I think this may account for at least a few of the divorces that result from an affair; the WS feels so guilty that it seems impossible to go back to their spouse.

After the affair started, that strife was gone. Surely she still refused to deal with some issues. But those didn't bother me anymore. I was happy, she was happy. We were happier than we had been in years.

So, tell me again why I had to stop my affair...an activity that by these definitions caused my marriage to be "good"?

Are we acknowledging that "marital arrangements" are, perhaps healthy for a marriage? I doubt that's what you meant.

Here is why I defend this point so vigorously...

If the spouses convince themselves that the marriage was GOOD before the affair, I think it prevents them from being motivated to examine all aspects of their marriage to identify issues. It makes it easier to just "sweep under the rug" OR easier to just blame all on the WS and refuse to really recover.

I think defining a good marriage as one that is happy and strife free is a huge disservice. I bet Brad and Jen had a very GOOD marriage at one point.

No, I think a GOOD marriage is one where Harley's Four Rules and other policies are passionately embraced - in a practical manner. One in which spouses learn to be interdependent as opposed to enmeshed or independent. That means you don't trust your spouse to a fault. That means you are INTENTIONAL about being open and honest and protecting your marriage. These things don't just happen...people decide to do them.

That said...I really doubt there are very many really good marriages out there. Many are just time bombs...due to the ignorance or naivity of the spouses. Sometimes they get lucky and the bomb never goes off...sometimes they don't.

That's why I think Marriage Builders should be a REQUIRED course for EVERY couple to get married, with 5 year updates to check progress.

Couples living in blissful ignorance are not necessarily living in "good" marriages.

Let's say I had a habit of leaving more doors unlocked. My house is not burglarized for 4 years...but then suddenly is.

Was my house "safe" for those 4 years...then suddenly not? Or could I have done more to make my house "safe".

Is Pittman talking about a certain kind of affair here? I felt no guilt during my A as described. Never made my wife the enemy...although I did treat her with great disrespect by having an A. I treated her like an emotional invalid and convinced myself that this is how things had to be for our marriage to survive...QED...no guilt.

The more I read here, the more I think my A really was an odd one.

Assuming that your wife knew of the affair, whether your marriage was good or not is a matter of your own subjective judgement. If you and your wife both felt you had a good marriage and you were satisfied with things as they were, who has the right to tell you otherwise? Pittman would call this a marital arrangement; simply an unconventional marital agreement between marriage partners.

On the other hand, if your wife was unaware of the affair, then the question would be thus: If your wife knew that you were having an affair, would she still consider it a good marriage?

Additionally, if you found that the only way you could endure your marriage was by having an affair, why would you consider it good? What you seem to be saying is that you had a terrible toothache, so you took aspirin everyday to alleviate the pain, and everything was fine after that. But you never bothered to seek treatment for the source of the pain and the fact that the aspirin killed the pain doesn't mean there was nothing wrong with your tooth.

All this still doesn't prove that affairs only occur in bad marriages. As Pittman points out, how is it that people are married for 20 years and produce 5 children and one spouse has an affair and claims the marriage was bad from the start? Was it really bad? Why is it that so few of these folks seek a separation or divorce PRIOR to having the affair? Could it be that they didn't really think it was bad until they started comparing their Stage I romance with their Stage II or III marriage?

My point has never been that infidelity only occurs in good marriages. It occurs in both bad and good marriages and for a variety of reasons. What I was trying to convey is that the so-called prevailing wisdom that affairs only occur in bad marriages is a myth, plain and simple. And this myth leaves many BS's with a sense of guilt which may be totally undeserved.

It is important to realize that part of the so-called "fog" we hear about can be the creation and exaggeration of marital problems that didn't exist prior to the affair.

Your situation may certainly be different.

You rationalized your affair to suppress your guilt, apparently quite successfully.

Thank you Hiker,
I 've said it ever since I came here, I don't think anyone believed me. I had a good happy marriage before my affair.
Comparing the excitement of the affair with being married for 15 years yeah, I agree with you. My marriage seemed bad then.

Take care
Scott

OnlyHuman,

It may have seemed bad by comparison, but that doesn't mean it was bad. Remember that Stage I is an idealized love based on projection and fantasy, and Stage II is reality-based. Any couple that stays together long enough in a loving relationship will move into Stage II.

Pittman says:


I might add that the lack of safety and security in the relationship actually makes it more passionate. When you aren't sure you have your lover "hooked" you keep doing everything you can to please him and/or make yourself more attractive to him.

Naturally, a secure love is part of what makes a marriage feel good, but it's passion that really grabs wandering spouses and clamps on "like snapping turtles."

hiker

my H actually said that every time he looks into my eyes...all he can see is the pain he put there...all he feels is the guilt and shame from what he did....

and the only way for him to heal is to do so away from me...

my eyes seem to be a mirror into his soul

so your quote above gets it exactly right it my case

but what do you do in these cases? how does it make semse???so the more i trusted him...the more i love him...the worse he feels.....so the more he stays away from me

his counselor did say that he doesn't think my H can live with what he has done to me...that he just wants to start over and pretend it never happended....

what Pittman says makes great sense...the OW is telling him that what he did was okay and he can live with that....and with her

Right, it just seemed bad and then I made it bad with all the lying etc etc
that affairs do.


Take care
Scott

eav,

If your husband truly feels this tremendous burden of guilt, there might be two approaches to dealing with it. One would be to convince him that he can be forgiven. The other is to show him that he can make amends by his future actions. For example, if you reconcile, part of the process he must go through is to make his life "transparent" for you. By that I mean he should provide you with a schedule of his daily activities, advise you whenever he deviates from that schedule, call you at various intervals throughout the day, provide complete access to all his e-mail accounts, and give you any information you might request about where he is and what he is doing. This is quite a burden, and if he feels guilty enough about his actions, he should be willing to do this for you. The act of doing this should assuage some of his guilt.

But as I am a naturally suspicious person, I would question whether he is really as guilty as either he or his counselor claim, because this also could be just another excuse for staying with the OW. And it's a good one; it makes him look like he's such a good person that he can't live with the pain he's caused you, so he's "sacrificing" himself by staying away from you and staying with the OW.

I'm not saying this is the case, just warning you that WSs will do or say just about anything to justify the affair and stay with the OP.

LO,

Who is responsible for you having your affair?

Thanks.

OnlyHuman,

The reason so few people may not have believed you about having a good marriage prior to the affair is that the MB concept says that affairs occur because you are not meeting some or all of the emotional needs of your spouse. I'm not sure whether the MB assumption is that if you have failed to meet your spouse's emotional needs, then by definition you have a bad marriage. However, the implication is that if your spouse is having an affair, it is because you have not met their emotional needs, and therefore you are at least partially to blame for creating the conditions that led to the affair.

I don't happen to believe this is true in all cases. In fact, Dr. Harley points out that men and women usually have completely different priorities when they list their emotional needs; the key here is that they don't know it.

Let me give you an example. Suppose your wife has Affection listed among her top 1 or 2 emotional needs, but you don't even list it in your top 5. Your wife, having the need for affection, is herself very affectionate because she is going to do for you what she wants for herself. You, on the other hand, list Sexual Fulfillment among your top 2 emotional needs. Her moves to be affectionate (which are non-sexual) cause you to assume she wants to make love. Her hugs and hand-holding somehow turn into a trip to the bedroom. It seems okay for a while, but eventually it begins to look to her like she can't touch you without it turning into sex, and though she likes sex, this is not what she is seeking with her affectionate actions. Therefore you are not meeting her need for affection in the way that she wants. Can you be blamed for this?

You thought you were doing what she wanted, but because men and women have such different emotional needs, and because they seldom sit down and communicate those needs, over time she might have become dissatisfied with that aspect of your relationship.

Your motivation was fine, it was your ignorance that got you into trouble.

My point is this: ignorance may not be an excuse for breaking the law, but it certainly isn't the grounds for blaming one spouse for the unhappiness of the other with the relationship. If you are unhappy, you need to communicate this to your spouse. If your spouse is unwilling or unable to work out the issue, or refuses to listen, that is a different story.

What I have read over and over in this forum, are examples of people who are blindsided by the discovery of an affair. They had no clue it was coming. The evidence would seem to indicate that their WS never told them the marriage was in crisis, or that they wanted a separation or divorce, until AFTER the affair began.

An obvious answer, Todd...we both know I am.

Acknowledging that a marriage needs work doesn't mean the BS assumes blame for the affair...

onlyhuman

i too have been frustrated with the lack of belief that prior to the affair....my H was a GOOD h....a very good H

i've been accused of seeing him through "rose colored glasses"

heck, he wouldn't have earned the fight that i've put into this since the affair happended if he hadn't been doing such a great job of meeting MY needs when i wasn't meeting his....of course i didn't know what his needs WERE cause he told OW and not me until i had him complete the emotional needs questionaire.....but he was already seeing OW then and told me that I wasn't the person that he wanted to meet those neds anymore....so he wouldn't let me reach him although i did plan A for a year

hiker

you have yet another good point...my H talked about his guilt and shame and how he needed to move on "alone" to heal....and he was seeing and then living with the OW the whole time.....and each time the OW broke things off with him to work on her marraige....he led me to believe that maybe we could work on things if I was willing to change....his guilt and shame weren't enough for him to be all alone....only enough to keep him away from me to "heal alone" if OW were there with him

would you recommend that i buy Pittman's book or have you shared mostof the important info here already?

eav,

I recommend you get the book. I think a lot of libraries have it, or if you prefer, I think Amazon sells it for about $12.

There's a lot of good information in it; much more than I can stick in this thread.